Chloe

Chloe, a lovely Greek name found in old romantic poetry, has been shooting up the charts for several years, now sitting at Number 10, and is also mega-popular throughout Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. Khloe -- another variant of Chloe -- has been moving up as well, thanks solely to the Kardashian klan.

Most people know by now that Chloe is pronounced with a hard initial C and two syllables -- kloh-ee. But that doesn't stop some people from pronouncing the initial ch as in chair, or pronouncing the name to rhyme with roll. While some parents try to clarify its pronunciation by adding an umlaut (those two little dots) or an accent over the e, this often just confuses matters further.

Unlike other Top 10 girls' names such as Olivia and Ava and Sophia, any of which may rise to Number 1, we don't see Chloe claiming the top spot in the U.S. Still, parents in search of a distinctive name will have to keep looking, with similar choices Zoe and Clara attracting their own considerable measure of attention.

While Chloe has not been used for any recent celebrity babies, it is the name of the now-grown daughters of Olivia Newton-John and of Candice Bergen and the late French film director Louis Malle. Actress and style leader Chloe Sevigny is another high-profile bearer.

Much more dynamic than most of the other Greek-based romantic literary names of the seventeenth century, Chloe appeared in Greek mythology as an alternative name for the goddess of agriculture and fertility, Demeter, and in the Greek pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe. It is also mentioned in the New Testament, appears in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and is the real name of Nobel prize-winning writer Toni Morrison.